May 9, 2014

One Mother’s Day many years ago, my younger brother handed Tina a card he made in his kindergarten class. When my mom saw it, she said, “That’s mine.” Tina laughed and handed the card to her boss.

Tina was our live-in housekeeper and nanny. For the first 18 years of my life, I saw her more than any other adult. She lived with us for nearly 34 years, earning money to support her seven siblings and their children back home in Nicaragua. Learning English was frustrating for her, so she taught us Spanish. Because my parents didn’t speak the language, we served as interpreters, negotiating everything from wages to vacations on her behalf.

In our four-bedroom colonial, she resided in the basement I perversely nicknamed “Little Nicaragua.” She said it was drafty down there, so she sometimes slept on a wooden bench in our breakfast nook instead. She was short, but the bench was even shorter, and her legs hung over it. Once when I insisted she sleep on the extra bed in my room, she yelled, “Acostarse!” She meant, “Go to bed,” but I thought she said, “Cásate,” which means, “Get married!” I ranted about feminism. Tina said I could marry whenever I wanted, but she needed to sleep.

In eighth grade, I broke up with my boyfriend because I had a crush on Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of the Who, and I felt guilty for liking two guys. A sensible teenager, I opted for the rock star, but the breakup still hurt. When I arrived home in tears, I found her crying too — over a storm that destroyed the roof of her family’s home. She wiped away my tears and her own, then reasoned that neither situation was as bad as when the Sandinistas shot her nephew’s hand.

Tina always had a different take on things. If I had a cut, Tina put butter on it. If I used tampons or went jogging, she lectured me about the damage to my ovaries. A Catholic, she had me baptized, even though I am Jewish. (She didn’t fess up until I was 23 and insisted she was covering all the bases.) When it came time for me to go to college, she didn’t understand why I couldn’t attend a local one. I felt guilty for abandoning her, so I tried to couch my leaving as a means of meeting a good husband. That, I knew, she would approve of.

Outsiders struggled to understand our relationship. I once kicked a classmate out of my house for referring to her by a racial slur. Well-intentioned people likened her to a “second mother.” But renaming our relationship undermined the pride Tina took in her job. She worked for us until the day she collapsed in my mom’s basement. She was 72.

As the nurses hooked up Tina to a breathing machine, I rummaged through her purse. I called every number I found. I discovered that she supported a neighbor financially. She frequented a Western Union branch office so often that the owners visited her in the hospital three times. Even though she was a Catholic, she regularly called an evangelical Protestant radio show; the hosts came to pay their respects to their No. 1 fan.

After alerting everyone, I tucked myself into her hospital bed, grateful to hold her hand. The doctors explained that there was nothing they could do for her. Eventually my brothers and I, along with Tina’s goddaughter, her cousin and my mom, made the decision to pull the plug. We — her friends, her family, including a former sister-in-law who flew in from Nicaragua, my family, managers of the Western Union and a priest — crowded into her hospital room to pray in Spanish, English and Hebrew.

Despite everything, I had sometimes questioned Tina’s love for me, because she was paid to care for us. But at her funeral, a neighborhood nanny asked if I had children of my own. I laughed for the first time since Tina died, remembering what she said to me about kids. Though she never had children of her own, she thought they were a woman’s greatest achievement; the bigger the litter, the better. She made an exception for me, though, when I reached my 30s and was still childless, telling me to have only two, max. She had loved me enough to compromise.

Catie Lazarus is a writer and the host of the podcast and talk show “Employee of the Month.”

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